Chapter Thirteen

I closed the door behind me and took a few deep breaths. I needed some space. I needed a minute to wrap my head around what the hell was going on. This morning I thought I’d been discarded like one of Will’s many conquests, and now he was saying he wanted more?

What the f**k?

Why was he complicating this? One of things I loved about Will was that people always knew where they stood with him. Good or bad, you always knew the score. Nothing about him had ever been complicated: sex, no complications. End of story. It was easier when I didn’t have the option to consider more.

He’d been the bad boy, the hot guy my sister fooled around with in a shed in the backyard. He’d been the object of my earliest fantasies. And it wasn’t that I’d spent my youth pining over him—the opposite, in fact—because knowing I could lust for him, but never actually stood a chance, made it easier somehow.

But now? Being able to touch him and have him touch me, hearing him say that he wanted more when there was no way he could actually mean it . . . complicated things.

Will Sumner didn’t know the meaning of more. Hadn’t he admitted to never having even a single long-term monogamous relationship? Having never found anyone who kept him interested long enough? Didn’t he get a text from one of his nongirlfriends the morning after we first had sex? No thanks.

Because as much as I loved spending time with him, and as fun as it was to pretend I could learn from him, I knew that I would never be a player. If I let him into more than my pants—if I let him into my heart and fell for him—I would submerge.

Deciding I actually did need to get to work, I started the shower, watching as steam filled the bathroom. I moaned as I stepped under the spray, letting my chin drop to my chest and the sound of water drown out the chaos in my thoughts. I opened my eyes and looked down at my body, at the smeared black ink on my skin.

All that is rare for the rare.

The words he’d drawn so carefully across my hip were now bleeding into each other. There were marks where the ink had rubbed off onto his hands, and touches that alternated between pressing bruises and feather-light caresses had left a necklace of smudged fingerprints between my br**sts, over my ribs, lower.

For a moment I let myself admire the gentle curve of his handwriting, remembering the determined expression on his face while he’d worked. His brows had knitted together, his hair fell forward to cover one eye. I was surprised when he didn’t reach up to push it back—a habit I’d come to find increasingly endearing—but he was so focused, so intent on what he’d been doing he’d ignored it and continued meticulously inking the words across my skin. And then he’d ruined it by losing his mind. And I’d freaked out.

I reached for the loofah and covered it in way too much body wash. I began scrubbing at the marks, half of them gone already from the heat and pressure of the spray, the rest dissolving into a sudsy mess that slipped down my body and into the drain.

With the last traces of Will and his ink washed from my skin and the water growing cold, I stepped out, dressing quickly and shivering in the cool air.

I opened the door to find him pacing the length of the room, running clothes back in place and a beanie on his head. He looked like he’d been debating leaving.

He whipped off his hat and spun to face me. “Fucking finally,” he muttered.

“Excuse me?” I said, temper flaring again.

“You’re not the one who gets to be mad here,” he said.

My jaw dropped. “I . . . you . . . what?”

“You left,” he spit out.

“To the next room,” I clarified.

“It was still f**ked-up, Hanna.”

“I needed space, Will,” I said, and, as if to further illustrate my point, walked out of the bedroom and down the hall. He followed.

“You’re doing it again,” he said. “Important rule: don’t freak out and walk away from someone in your own house. Do you know how hard that was for me?”

I stopped in the kitchen. “You? Do you have any idea what kind of a bomb that was to drop? I needed to think!”

“You couldn’t think there?”

“You were naked.”

He shook his head. “What?”

“I can’t think when you’re naked!” I shouted. “There was too much.” I motioned to his body but quickly decided that was a bad idea. “It was just . . . I freaked, okay?”

“And how do you think I felt?” He glared at me, the muscles of his jaw flexing. When I didn’t answer, he shook his head and looked down, shoving his hands into his pockets. That was a bad idea. The waist of his track pants slipped lower, the hem of his shirt moved up. And oh. That little slice of toned stomach and hipbone was most definitely not helping.